ABSTRACT
People need to understand what is going on in the social world. They develop lay theories or beliefs, sometimes called implicit theories, to help them understand the world, just as psychologists develop theories to help them understand people. People are not necessarily aware of the theories or their impacts, thus lay theories may be implicit and non-systematic (Furnham, 1988), but they play important roles in peoples’ everyday lives. For example, implicit theories of personality are found to guide people’s interpretations of social behaviors and impression formation (see Chiu, Hong, & Dweck, 1997; Tong & Chiu, 2002). Implicit theories also have been found to be a basis for constructing personal history (Ross, 1989). Researchers have studied lay theories of happiness (Furnham, Cheng, & Shirasu, 2001), lay theories of aging (e.g., Bergstrom & Holmes, 2000; McDonald-Miszczak, Hertzog, & Hultsch, 1995), lay theories of psychotherapy (e.g., Furnham, Pereira, & Rawles, 2001; Najavits, 1997), and lay theories of suicide (Lester, 2001). In this chapter, I focus on lay theories of change, which refer to the theories or beliefs people have regarding the development of events, people, and things.
